We know that Sony provides its owners with free access to its PSN service but how much does it cost Sony to provide the service to its users.Sony is already losing money in every PS3 sale and to provide some more and not cost for it is tough for Sony.On the other side Microsoft charges for its XBL service and just recently it was announced that they made 1 billion$ of it.If Sony wants to reduce their losses of 4 billion$ or something,they need to have a good revenue sources and PSN is a big source for it.Most of the users think the service should be free but they don't care what happens to the company that provides it.I also think that the service should be free but to give support to the company that provided us the great PS1 and the PS2 and some of the best game of all time,I am ready to pay for it now.

What are your views on this topic?

That's what Qore and Home is. A revenue stream for Sony. Put its not forced upon anyone. Honestly, they have to straighten out a lot more stuff before they can even think about charging for PSN. They still need to have better voice support for all their games, better cross game invites, fix a lot of multiplayer game issues. Start using more servers for game hosting instead of peer to peer networking.

If Steam can do a better job of hosting online game and don't charge for it, neither console really needs to be charging for their service.

Probably not much, seeing as I can't get a good connection to save my life.

Seriously, it's a good question. Though from the way they presented it, Microsoft didn't make that $1 billion from Live Gold but rather from marketplace downloads.

From all that I speak to: They won't pay for home because they already pay for Live. Remember Live has over 12+ million PAYING subscribers. So you can thank MS for crushing the dreams of having Sony charging and getting away with it.

However, that's assuming Sony charges $60 a year (again, I never pay more then $39 a year for Live, there are too many deals for it every year on multiple sites) and if Sony charged $30 or less a year I'm sure a lot of people would buy into it. Perhaps Killzone 2 should be so awesome they should introduce pay per play with Killzone 2.

IMHO Sony is passing up on money they could easily earn to offset some of their debt. If MS didn't have Live and DLC revenue they would have been in much worst shape.

With that said I can't imagine Sony paying too much for hosting @Home.

Meh, paying for PSN would seriously mess up Sony to be honest, its a very appealing feature when people are waying up costs, especially considering how much more expensive the PS3 is now. Sony makes money from the downloads just like MS, and as has already been mentioned, Home will rake in more than enough money from advertising alone, not to mention people paying ridiculous prices for santa costumes over the holidays.